> Many times, the best approach is first searching online and reading the code to a few other solutions, then writing your own with the knowledge you’ve gained

> Many times, the best approach is first searching online and reading the code to a few other solutions, then writing your own with the knowledge you’ve gained from seeing how they work. I think this is a great approach. Any general solution library will be much larger and more complex than one project's use case. Seeing how other people have solved a given problem can give a dev a nice jump start on creating a compact solution to their given problem. For whatever reason many devs just love using dependencies and almost always underestimate the long term costs, in terms of maintenance and vulnerability risk. I once had to write a simple utility script that was literally 5 lines of Python. All it did was loop through a list and perform a couple simple actions. As I mentioned it to the PM, another dev jumped in and said, "Oh hey, there's Library_X that we can install that will totally handle that for you". I responded that the library could very well be great, but script was already done, had only taken about 15 minutes to write, and would be very easy to reason about and update down the line. Reading about and implementing a whole new library to do the same thing just didn't seem useful. The other dev sounded unconvinced.